Category Archives: Debosnys Ciphers

I recently posted about my search for Edouard Keff, and noted that it was possible that he might have been born in Chateaurouge as a brother of Jean Keff and Pierre Keff whose troubled (bagnard) histories I had previously found.

As part of all this, I ended up doing my best to reconstruct the Keff family tree, something which no genealogist on filae.com or on Geneanet.org seems to have managed particularly well. However, I should point out that a good part of this was probably because they often rely on specialised town / area genealogical studies, where groups of volunteers comb through a locality’s birth / baptism / marriage (and sometimes divorce) / death registers, and then use that to try to assemble local family trees.

Because geographical mobility was (for the most part) traditionally low, this – as a genealogical rule of thumb – makes plenty of practical sense. But for more mobile families (like the one that Jean & Pierre Keff were born in), you end up with different localised fragments of genealogy in different places that don’t quite connect up with each other. As you’ll see, the Keff famille moved from Hombourg-Haut, Moselle to Chateaurouge, Moselle, to Bouzonville, Moselle, to Paris.

The parents of the Keff family

• Pierre Marie Keff: b. 21 Aug 1801, Hombourg, Moselle, to Jean Keff & Eve Weiss; d. 29 Aug 1848, Paris 5e Arrondissement
• Catherine Andre: b. 10 Oct 1805 to Pierre Andre and Anne Marie Hamann, died 1894, Paris 15e Arrondissement.
• Married: 20 Oct 1830, Hombourg-Haut, Moselle.

Their children

• Jean Keff: b. 1830 Hombourg Haut, d. 1830
• Jean Michel Keff: b. 23 Sep 1831, Hombourg Haut; d. 05 July 1853, Terre-de-Haut, Guadeloupe
• Pierre Keff: b. 13 May 1833, Chateaurouge; d. 15 Jun 1911, Paris
• Catherine Keff: b. 03 Apr 1835, Chateaurouge; [death unknown]
• Marguerite Keff: b. 15 May 1837, Bouzonville; d. 13 Jan 1843, Bouzonville
• Therese Keff: b. 02 Apr 1839, Bouzonville; d. 1894, Paris
• Jean Keff: b. 25 July 1841, Bouzonville; d. 10 Feb 1894, Ile Nou, Nouvelle Caledonie
• Elisabeth Keff: b. 11 Apr 1843, Bouzonville; d. [“Elise Keff”] 27th April 1849, Paris, 5e Arrondissement
• Madelaine Keff: b. Jan 1844, Bouzonville; d. 13 January 1844
• Joseph Keff: b. 30 Apr 1845, Bouzonville; d. 19 Jan 1846
• Nicolas Keff: b. 12 Feb 1848; d. 28 Apr 1849 Paris, 5e Arrondissement

Their grandchildren

Therese Keff married Joseph Claude Branciard (theatre director) [b. ~1836].

• No children (as far as I can see)

Pierre Keff married Catherine Birschens. They had two children:

• Victorine Josephine Keff: b. 27 Nov 1864; d. 03 May 1865
• Josephine Catherine Keff: b. 21 Jun 1863, Paris; d. 14 Mar 1944, Paris

Jean Keff married Reine Lichtenberger. They had four children:

• Leon Pierre Jean Keff: b. 20 Feb 1865, Paris; d. 27 Feb 1900, Paris (as “Pierre Jean Leon Keff”)
• Pierre Jean Baptiste Keff: b. 20 Jun 1866, Paris; [but then disappears]
• Jules Joseph Keff: b. Jun 1866 (?); d. 9th Mar 1869 [aged 2 years 9 months]
• Anais Keff: b. 24 Feb 1869, Paris; d. 06 May 1887, Paris

Note that Pierre Jean Baptiste Keff and Jules Joseph Keff seem to have been born at almost exactly the same time: which I think means that they were either (a) twins, or (b) the same child but with two different names (we have a birth day for one and a death day for the other). I suspect that the latter of these two scenarios is the more likely.

Their great-grandchildren

Josephine Catherine Keff married Victor Pierre van de Casteele, but:

• No children (as far as I can see)

At which point the entire Keff family tree seems to just disappear. 🙁

Note that Victor Pierre van de Casteele was born in Brest on 13 Sep 1847; married Mathilde Judith Jeanne Delphine RACQUE (RAQUE) in 1880 (they divorced in 1892); and died in Paris 14e Arrondissement in 1926 aged 79, or in Paris 20e Arrondissement in 1930 aged 83 (I’m not sure which of the two is correct). So it seem highly likely to me that he would have married Josephine Catherine Keff (16 years younger than him) in 1892 or later.

Are there any loose ends?

Jean Michel Keff, born in 1831, died as a 21-year-old marine infantryman in l’Hopital des Saintes on an island in the Guadeloupe archipelago. Note the main feature of this island was a military prison: so it’s entirely possible that he was in prison there, possibly for desertion (it was common at this time for young French military to try to run away to America). I also suspect that he may have joined the marines once his father died in 1848.

For Pierre Keff born in 1833, having served his sentence in Nouvelle Caledonie (which extended slightly for trying to escape), he was released in 11 Aug 1889. At his death, he was described as a widower of Catherine Derichelle (is that a Belgian surname?), but I have found no mention of any children.

For Catherine Keff born in 1835, there seems no mention of her as an Optant in 1872 (as part of the fallout from the Franco-Prussian War, people from the Moselle etc had to publicly declare their allegiance). And there is also no sign of marriage etc. Hence my suspicion here is that she simply died young and failed to get listed (there are some glaring holes in the Chateaurouge register, which makes me think that a number of pages got lost along the way).

Finally: I have worked hard to try to find any trace of Leon Pierre Jean Keff (1865-1900) beyond his birth and death, but have so far found nothing. He was an “imprimeur”, died while living at Impasse des Couronnes 5: but there is no mention of his having had a widow or wife (and no marriage in filae.com).

Thoughts, Nick?

To be fair, I suspect the main reason no genealogists seem to have picked up on this whole Keff family tree is simply because it fizzled out, leaving (of course) no modern branch looking back at it. Sure, the (modern) Lichtenbergers have Reine Lichtenberger on their tree, but as for her (apparently psychosexually-challenged) husband, there was no mention. Perhaps it wasn’t something that anyone really wanted to talk about, then or now.

Might there have been a specific reason why this branch of the Keffs disappeared? While it’s true that infant mortality in France in the 19th century was fairly dreadful, I think that that alone isn’t nearly enough to explain this whole story.

Beyond that, I really don’t know: but I do often think about how easily Sigmund Freud constructed his (frankly rather nutty) theories in response to the constant barrage of childhood traumas his patients presented him with. This was a brutal time to be young, where a less-than-perfect roll of Fate’s dice left you abused, or exploited, or just plain dead.

What force was driving Pierre Keff and Catherine Andre around Moselle, and from there to Paris? Was it ambition, or hunger, or need, or tragedy, or whim? I guess we’ll never know.

If you recall, a French journalist claimed that the real identity of mysterious wife murderer Henri Debosnys was in fact poetic fantasist Edward (Edouard) Keff: and that the journalist had been at the Lycee Charlemagne in Paris with Keff in 1845 (at the age of about 12).

Unfortunately, my previous efforts to trace any such Edouard Keff using (the usually pretty good) filae.com and (the often moderately frustrating) geneanet.org had proven unsuccessful. So I decided to approach the same hunt from a completely different angle…

How To Look For Someone Who Isn’t There

The French archives are pretty good, but they – like pretty much all archives ever – can have holes that seem (inevitably) to (not) contain the things you are trying to find. So: what I tried to do this time round was to look for a Keff family with a connection to Paris, but with a gap in their documented children around 1833.

Through filae.com, I found a Nicolas Keff born in Paris’ 5e Arrondissement on 12 Feb 1848, but who died on 28 Apr 1849. I also found a Pierre Keff who died in Paris’ 5e Arrondissement on 29 Aug 1848. From that, it seemed fairly likely that Pierre Keff had been Nicolas Keff’s father. Might I be able to find any older brothers or sisters born to the same father?

It didn’t take long to find Pierre Keff’s wife and most of their children (though note that most of the family trees I found on Geneanet were woefully incomplete). So here are the details I was able to dig up:

Pierre Keff & Catherine Andre

Pierre Keff

• b. 21 Aug 1801, Hombourg, Moselle, to Jean Keff & Eve Weiss
• d. 29 Aug 1848, Paris 5e Arrondissement

Catherine Andre

• b. 10 Oct 1805 to Pierre Andre and Anne Marie Hamann
• in 1894, living in Rue des Dames, 15e Arrondissement, Asnieres (Seine)

The two married on 20 Oct 1830, Hombourg-Haut, Moselle

Pierre Keff & Catherine Andre’s Children

Jean Keff

• b. 1830, Hombourg Haut, Moselle.
• d. 1830, Hombourg Haut, Moselle.

Jean Michel Keff

• b. 23 Sep 1831, Hombourg Haut, Moselle.
• d. 05 July 1853, Terre-de-Haut, Guadeloupe

Marguerite Keff

• b. 15 May 1837, Bouzonville
• d. 13 Jan 1843, Bouzonville

Therese Keff (an “artiste dramatique”)

• b. 02 Apr 1839, Bouzonville
• m. Joseph Claude Branciard (theatre director) [b. ~1836]
• d. 1894

Jean Keff

• b. 25 July 1841, Bouzonville

Elisabeth Keff

• b. 11 April 1843, Bouzonville

Madelaine Keff

• b. January 1844, Bouzonville
• d. 13 January 1844

Joseph Keff

• b. 30 Apr 1845, Bouzonville
• d. 19 Jan 1846

[+ probably Nicolas Keff, as mentioned above]

Minding The Gap?

Having now looked at lots of French archives from around this time, marriage was often linked with / triggered by a birth in the same year as the wedding; and that this was then followed by the appearance of children every 1-2 years thereafter (but also, sadly, suffering a lot of infant mortality).

In the case of the Keff/Andre family, we see them both getting married and having their first child in 1830; and then having children in 1831, 1837, 1839, 1841, 1843, 1844, 1845, and probably 1848.

Now, I can’t easily prove that they had more children in the period 1832-1836 (but probably not in either Hombourg-Haut or Bouzonville, where the records seem to be pretty good): but I have to say that it does seem likely. But I can pretty much prove that they were in the 5e Arrondissement in 1848 (when Pierre died) and probably in Paris beyond that (because Catherine Andre ended up in the 15e Arrondissement in 1894).

All the same, that’s all that I was able to find by searching filae.com etc.

…But Here’s The Twist I Wasn’t Expecting

Even though I was being completely logical and sensible with all the above searching, I have to point out (somewhat annoyingly) that I was also being a complete idiot. Because the Jean Keff born on 25 July 1841 in Bouzonville was (if had stopped to think about it) also exactly the same Jean Keff who I had previously traced to the Bagne de Toulon and beyond: while his brother Pierre Keff (not listed above) who I had also traced to the Bagne de Toulon and beyond was born in 13 May 1833 in Chateaurouge, Moselle.

So, without even realising that that was what I was doing, I had actually reconstructed the rest of the Keff bagnards’ family tree sideways and upwards (note that I had already found a fair few of their children).

Hence my suspicion that Pierre Keff and Catherine Andre had more children in the 1832-1836 period turned out to be correct: and the place where they were living around then was almost certainly Chateaurouge (6km from Bouzonville, and 35km from Hombourg-Haut), where their son Pierre Keff was born.

Looking at children born in Chateaurouge around that time, there was also a Catherine Keff born there on 03 Apr 1835 (but the listing has no mention of who her parents were). Even so, if she had been born to Pierre Keff and Catherine Andre, she would have been their first-born daughter, so it would be entirely conventional to name her after her mother: hence I’d be utterly unsurprised if she was their daughter.

So we can probably extend the list of children’s birth years to 1830, 1831, 1833, (probably) 1835, 1837, 1839, 1841, 1843, 1844, 1845, and (probably) 1848.

Still Looking For Edouard Keff…

Putting all the above together, it seems entirely rational to me to wonder whether the same parents had an additional child called Edouard in Chateaurouge around 1832-1834, particularly given that we already know so much about that boy’s somewhat infamous brothers. Even so, I can’t help but feel that I’m now really really running out of source documents to trawl my way through, so what other documents might there be out there that can I go looking for now? That question, alas, is as far as I’ve got this time round. 🙁

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to work out if there was a way I could set up a funding page for a genealogist-driven collaborative effort to identify Henry Debosnys from his DNA.

Obviously, the funding would need to cover the two physical stages:

• Extracting his DNA – the nice people at the Adirondack History Museum have both his skull and the hangman’s noose that killed him (the skin on his neck was abraded for four inches, according to a contemporary newspaper report), so this looks to be achievable; and
• Scanning the extracted DNA and uploading it into some historical database for familial matches (the same as virtually every other programme on TV at the moment).

It turns out that extracting his DNA is the (relatively) easy part. The second part is actually much trickier, because it seems that pretty much all the consumer services out there (e.g. AncestryDNA, even Nebula Genomics) have highly optimised their low-cost DNA acquisition pipelines for either cheek-swab / saliva samples or blood samples.

Moreover, the helpful support people at AncestryDNA also told me that it would explicitly go against the company’s policy to take DNA samples from someone who had died. So there would seem to be a series of mountains for historical researchers to climb there.

Note that there are a (very small number of) commercial whole genome scanning services out there that don’t rely on cheek swabs or blood: but my understanding is that these tend to be quite expensive. So as of right now, it would seem that we’re kind of stuck between the two: crowdfunding a cheek swab test would be do-able (probably south of 1000USD, all in), but I’m guessing that this would rise to about 2500USD with a bespoke special WGS from extracted DNA.

Having recently spent time going through French archives via filae.com, I had thought that trying to track Debosnys’ genetic footprints would be a great project to crowdfund and take on, but I’ve been left somewhat bemused. So if anyone reading can suggest a better route forward for scanning extracted DNA and then GEDmatching it, please leave a comment below, I’m all ears!

Finally, I should mention an alternative route. Australian DNA genealogy company totheletter DNA have been offering a (really rather incredible) service where you send them old letters / stamps and they then extract DNA from the saliva used to stick the dried adhesive down. However, it turns out that they’ve been having some problems with the quality of the DNA extracted in this way, so they temporarily halted the service last year, but hope to bring it back online later this year (2021).

While looking for lists of people “condamne a mort” in the tumult of 1871 France, I stumbled upon a list of 34 convicts who had escaped from France’s Pacific prisons in Nouvelle-Caledonie prior to 1876. (Which was what I had actually hoped to find, but hadn’t believed my archival luck was strong enough to do so.)

Anyway, the table I found in the Journal officiel de la Republique francaise, 17 Janvier 1876, p.19 (thanks to retronews.fr) was a pretty good starting point. However, according to this 2010 article by Pierre-Henri Zaidman, it was incomplete. For example, in January 1872, the minister for overseas affairs wrote that “jusqu’à présent trois évasions seulement ont été accomplies avec succès“, and Zaidman has no names for those three. (Though I’m guessing these were Villin, Patras, and Marsay.)

Even though I started by using (paywalled) filae.com to find individual bagnard’s records, I also subsequently found a (free) online database (courtesy of the Archive Nationales d’outre-mer) that allows you to search the same records (e.g. by searching the ‘Notes’ field for “evade”). This was very helpful, and allowed me to extend the search backwards by a few years.

Finally, I also found “L’ Archipel des forçats: Histoire du bagne de Nouvelle-Calédonie (1863-1931)” by Louis-José Barbançon, which is an excellent resource.

The List of Escaped Convicts

Barbançon says (p.202) that 25 convicts were thought to have escaped during 1866-1870, and 184 during 1871-1880, though I believe these figures includes les disparus.

All the same, I should point out that the length of the list below is perhaps slightly deceptive. For example, it seems certain that the entire group with Dr Paul Rastoul on 12 Mar 1875 drowned when their boat hit the reefs off l’île d’Ouen. So, while they did technically escape, it can hardly be said that they got away. 🙁

Barbançon discusses this at some length: had these convicts escaped or merely, ummm, disappeared? The reaction of the prison authorities seems to have been little more than a collective Gallic shrug: either way, such people were no longer their responsibility.

• — 07 Jan 1866 —
• Louis Charles Benoni Villin (no prison record, but he seems to have subsequently married Marie Damariste Phalenie Bouguignon on 06 Mar 1883 in Freniches)
• — 12 May 1867 —
• Etienne Lonjarret (b. 19 Jul 1833)
• Auguste Alexandre Gence (b. 29 Sep 1837) (but appears to have died in Paris in 1887?)
• Francois Manipoud (b. 1829), fratricide
• Francois Marion (Marion’s body was the only one of the four that was found)
• — 17 Jul 1867 —
• Joseph Patras (b. 19 Jul 1843), murder
• — 27 Aug 1869 —
• Pierre Marsay (b. 22 Aug 1829)
• — 6 May 1873 —
• Isidore Petit (b. 12 Oct 1840)
• — 9 Nov 1873 —
• Jules Deslandes, 29 years old, “tourneur-repousseur” (and Communard)
• — 3 Jan 1874 —
• Edmond Moriceau (b. 25 Mar 1837), the notes say he was supposed to have “parti pour Sydney”, but also that he died 4 May 1879?
• — 7 Jan 1874 —
• Paul Robin 1837-1912
• — 27 Jan 1874 —
• Two (unnamed?) convicts escaped (according to Zaidman)
• — 20 Mar 1874 —
• Paschal Jean Francois Grousset 1844-1909 [politician, journalist, translator and science fiction writer] wrote “Les condamnés politiques en Nouvelle-Calédonie” (1876) with Francois Jourde
• Olivier Pain 1845-1884 [journalist]
• Victor Henri Rochefort de Lucay 1831-1913 [Marquis de Rochefort-Luçay, see “Henri Rochefort : déportation et évasion d’un polémiste” (2004) Joël Dauphiné]
• Francois Jourde 1843-1893 (wrote “Souvenirs D’Un Membre de La Commune“)
• Achille Ballière 1840-1905 (architect, wrote “La Déportation de 1871: Souvenirs d’un Évadé de Nouméa“)
• Charles Bastien
• Charles Grantille (perhaps Grandthille?)
• — 23 May 1874 —
• Francois Coutouby, 37 years old, “agent d’affaires et marchand de vin”
• — 20 Jan 1875 —
• Ernest Harenger, 37 years old, “cordonnier, ancien militaire” (believed drowned during an attempted escape)
• — 12 Mar 1875 —
• Eugène Barthélemy (b. 17 Sep 1847)
• Martin Louis Berger (b. 12 Oct 1841)
• François Palma (b. 02 Jun 1840)
• Michel Eugene Galut (b. 09 Mar 1841)
• Vincent Guigue (FR ANOM COL H 84)
• Alexandre Eugene Gilbert (FR ANOM COL H 82)
• Charles Auguste Emile Demoulin (b. 30 Aug 1851)
• Pierre-Marie Alexandre Masson (b. 31 Jan 1847)
• Mathieu Chabrouty (b. 13 May 1853)
• Marcel Julien Roussel (b. 01 Apr 1850)
• Louis Auguste Leblant (b. 30 Jan 1838)
• Henri Gaston Edat (b. 21 Feb 1854)
• Louis Garnier [no mention of an escapee by this name in the prison files, though convict Louis Hubert Garnier died in hospital in 1875?]
• Jean Savy (b. 15 Sep 1838)
• Dr Paul Emile Bethelemy Philemon Rastoul (b. 01 Oct 1835)
• Auguste Ledru (b. 22 Jun 1829)
• Jean Antoine Auguste Saurel (b. 06 Dec 1842)
• HippoIyte Jules Sauvé (b. 07 Sep 1839)
• Prosper Gaspard Ephege Adam (b. 16 Jan 1848)
• Edouard Duchesne (b. 06 Dec 1842)
• — 20 Jun 1875 — (group landed at Wide Bay near Maryborough, all given an amnesty in 1879)
• Emile Charles Paty (b. 16 Nov 1842)
• François Décombes (b. 11 Mar 1833)
• Laurent Brissard (b. 09 Jul 1845)
• Pierre Graillot (b. 08 Jan 1851)
• Alexandre Joseph Rousseau (b. 02 Jul 1841)
• — 4 Jul 1875 —
• Louis Jean Baptiste Merchez (b. 04 Mar 1842) [Note that he appears to have had a son Paul Henri Merchez in 1886 with his wife Zaire Irma Hennion (b.1846)]
• Eugene Sellier (Aged 37 in 1874)
• — 10 Jul 1875 —
• Gilles Etienne Excoffier (b. 13 Nov 1843), journalier, house-breaker [Appears to have died in 1917]
• — 27 Oct 1875 —
• Claude Faury (b. Jan 1843)
• — 9 Nov 1875 —
• Adolphe Eugene Fabret (aged 41 in 1874)
• Jevin (?)
• Denis Louis Roch Siblanc (aged 29 in 1873))
• Martin (?)
• Barrely (?)

More for your Manet…

Finally, just because I like to spoil you, here’s Manet’s painting of Henri Rochefort and his five fellow Communard escapees rowing from Nouvelle-Caledonie to Australia.

Before moving on, I thought I ought to publish my last few notes on Jean Keff and Pierre Keff, in case someone passing happens to be trying to work out their family tree. (I should again stress what a good source of information filae.com is.)

Children of Jean Keff & Reine Lichtenberger

Note that in the notes for Jules Joseph Keff, Jean Keff is referred to as “Jean Pierre Keff”.

Leon Pierre Jean Keff
b. 20 Feb 1865, Paris
d. 27 Feb 1900, Paris (named as "Pierre Jean Leon Keff")

Pierre Jean Baptiste Keff
b. 20 Jun 1866, Paris

Anais Keff
b. 24 Feb 1869, Paris
d. 06 May 1887, Paris

Jules Joseph Keff
d. 9th Match 1869, aged 2 years 9 months

Children of Pierre Keff & Catherine Birschens

Note that Pierre Keff’s profession is given as both “tailleur” and “polisseur”, while Catherine Birschens is referred to as “cartonniere”.

Catherine Birschens died on 13 Mar 1871 at Epinay-sur-Orge.

Victorine Josephine Keff
b. 27 Nov 1864
d. 03 May 1865 at 4 Rue Grange aux Belles, aged 5 months

Josephine Catherine Keff
b. 21 Jun 1863, Paris
m. (no date) Victor Pierre van de Casteele
d. 14 Mar 1944, Paris

I was certain the French archives would have good, solid information on historical prisoners, so went looking for them. And that’s how I found the official French archive site filae.com, which (modest paywall notwithstanding) was actually very impressive (To be precise, searching filae is a bit hit and miss, but the depth of the archives is excellent.)

So I can now say with certainty what happened to Jean Keff and Pierre Keff (oddly, I wasn’t able to find prison records for Marie Ratier, the widow Bon).

What Happened to Jean Keff?

As we already know, Jean Keff was given a life sentence in 1872 for the attempted rape of minor Henriette X, and his appeal was rejected. He then escaped from Le Bagne de Toulon on 14 Oct 1872, but was recaptured on 22 Oct 1872.

His prison records take up his story. (There is a note that he had a previous 13-month conviction in 1860.) For attempting to escape, he was sentenced to three years in ‘double chains’. He was then unchained on 25 Jan 1873 and transferred to Nouvelle-Caledonie on the transport ship Le Rhin. There, his attempts to escape continued:

• 20 Oct 1873: escaped Ile Nou, recaptured 22 Oct 1873
• 23 Dec 1875: escaped Ile Nou, recaptured 25 Dec 1875
• 1879: escaped Ile Nou, recaptured
• 4 May 1880: escaped Ile Nou, recaptured on the 6th
• Jul 1884: not sure what happened here

Sadly, the final entry in Jean Keff’s three pages of prison records isn’t hard to predict:

• Died at Ile Nou, 10 Feb 1894

What Happened To Pierre Keff?

From the reports we have already seen, we know that Pierre Keff too was given a life sentence in 1872 for his part in the conspiracy to rape Henriette X. His appeal against the sentence was upheld, but he was due to be rearrested and retried.

From his prison record, we can see that that the sentence given to him in his retrial was 15 years: he arrived at Le Bagne de Toulon on 09 Sep 1872. As with thousands of other bagnards, he was subsequently transported to Nouvelle-Caledonie on 18 Apr 1873. Despite escaping from Ile Nou (on 02 Dec 1873), he was recaptured on 14 Dec 1873.

However, when the authorities responded (on 06 May 1874) by extending his sentence by two years, that punishment seems to have put him off trying to escape again, because – unlike his brother Jean’s long list of escape attempts – the next event in Pierre Keff’s prison record is his release on 11 Aug 1889, 17 years after his trial.

A search of filae.com’s death records found the same Pierre Keff (still born in Chateau-Rouge to Pierre Keff and Catherine Andre, but now a widower of Catherine Derichelle) dying in Paris at 11.45am on 15 Jun 1911. His brother Jean is also mentioned here as having died in Ile Nou.

So I think there is, alas, no way that Pierre Keff could have been Henry Debosnys.

So… Where Next?

Given that I mistrust just about everything wife-killer Henry Debosnys claimed as his history; that his body had what looked like prison tattoos (the Philadelphia Times noted that Debosnys seemed like a French convict); and that the French journalist claiming to have known him thought his real surname was Keff and that he was born around 1833, it wasn’t entirely unreasonable to wonder whether Pierre Keff – born 1833, and sent to Le Bagne de Toulon for conspiracy to rape a minor – might have been both people.

Intriguingly, Stefano Guidoni notes that Debosnys’ Portugibberish notes included the word “noumea”, which is the capital of Nouvelle-Caledonie. So, much as I doubt both the veracity and the sincerity of all Debosnys’ writings, there remains a vague suspicion that there may be something real peeking through the cracks there.

But was this even the same M. Keff described by the Parisian journalist, “a good-sized fellow with long black hair, a smooth, fat always carefully shaved face“? Here’s his physical description when he left prison:

The blond beard sounds somewhat inconsistent, hein? But it is Pierre Keff’s profession – “polisseur” – that is arguably the most inconsistent with the journalist’s account.

I don’t know: right now, I doubt I’ve even found the right Keff, never mind the right Debosnys. And for Keffs, the French historical prison records list only the two brothers.

Perhaps the historical records of Charlemagne college will be able to throw a little more light on this, if (as claimed) Keff attended there in 1845 as a 12 year old. At this distance in time, this might be the only practical way to verify the journalist’s story. (Did he even have Keff’s surname correct? We don’t know.)

At the same time, I’m wondering whether it might be worth looking at escaped French convicts from the period 1870-1880. I mentioned a few before, but Docteur Raoulx might possibly have included a list in his 1929 book. Something to think about, anyway…

I wondered whether Retronews.fr (the BnF’s old newspaper site) might have anything to say on the subject of Jean Keff and Pierre Keff. To my surprise and pleasure, it did…

Escape From Le Bagne de Toulon

I quickly found two short news articles from 1872 concerning Jean Keff’s escape from Le Bagne de Toulon, in the same year that he and his brother were imprisoned there:

L’Événement, 20 Octobre 1872, p.2

Toulon, 18 octobre. – On a constaté, il y a deux jours, l’évasion de deux forçats, Fireil et Keff, condamnés, le premier à 15 ans de travaux forcés, et le second à perpétuité. Keff est né à Strasbourg, et c’est l’idée de devenir Prussien qui l’a déterminé, dit-on, à s’évader.

La Gironde, 19 Octobre 1872, p.2

On a constaté le 14 de ce mois deux évasions du bagne de Toulon, celles du nommé Jean Foreit, condamné à quinze ans de travaux forcés, et de Jean Keff, condamné à perpétuité, le premier pour vol qualifié, et le second pour viol. Keff est né à Strasbourg. Il est probable que l’idée de s’affranchir en devenant Prussien l’aurait déterminé à s’évader. Mais tout donne à croire que, pas plus que son camarade, il ne réussira à se soustraire aux recherches de la justice, leur signalement ayant été immédiatement envoyé à toutes les autorités.

Because these are so similar, here’s my translation for the second (and slightly longer) of the two (which seems to have first appeared in the Petit Marseillais, 17 Oct 1872, p.2, but which I had to find by hand because Retronews hadn’t indexed it, bah):

On the 14th of this month, two men escaped from Toulon prison: Jean Foreit (serving fifteen years forced labour for robbery) and Jean Keff (serving life imprisonment for rape). Keff was born in Strasbourg, so it is likely that the idea of freeing himself in order to become a Prussian would have been his motivation to escape. But everything suggests that, no more than his comrade, he will not succeed in evading justice, details of their escape having immediately been sent to all the authorities.

Errm… That Didn’t Go To Plan

A little bit of follow-on Googling handily revealed that the two Jeans’ escape indeed failed to go to plan. Here’s what Le Petit Marseillais, 25 Oct 1872, reported (which I found online here):

Voici quelques nouveaux détails assez curieux sur l’arrestation des deux forçats évadés du bagne de Toulon.
On les croyait d’abord cachés dans les magasins généraux de l’arsenal et supposant les avoir là bloqués on espérait les prendre par la famine.
Pendant, ce temps les deux forçats avaient réussi à prendre la clef des champs, ils ne marchaient que pendant la nuit et se dirigeaient, par la montagne, vers la frontière. Arrivés dans le canton de Trets sur la route d’Aix à St-Maximin ils avisèrent une maison isolée et s’y présentèrent hardiment pour demander l’hospitalité. Mal leur en prit, car ils venaient de tomber en pleine caserne de gendarmerie du Rousset. On divine bien l’accueil qui leur fut fait. Le lendemain ils furent conduits sous bonne escorte à Aix, et delà à Toulon, où les portes de bagne s’ouvrirent de nouveau pour eux.

My translation (note that even though the article doesn’t specifically mention Keff’s name, it was published less than a fortnight after the previous story, so I think it extremely likely both are connected):

Here are some new and rather curious details about the arrest of the two convicts who recently escaped from the Toulon penal colony.
It had initially been thought that the two had hidden in the general stores of the arsenal and, assuming they had been stranded there, the hope was to starve them out.
However, while all that was going on, the two convicts succeeded in scarpering via the back door, and, walking only at night, headed via the mountain road towards the border. When they arrived in the canton of Trets on the road from Aix to St-Maximin, they noticed an isolated house and confidently presented themselves there to ask for hospitality. This, however, worked out badly for them, because the house was in fact right in the middle of the Rousset gendarmerie barracks. It really isn’t hard to imagine the welcome they received there. The next day the two were securely escorted to Aix, and from there to Toulon, where the prison doors opened once more for them.

(The story had previously been briefly reported in Le Petit Marseillais, 24 Oct 1872, p.2: “Les deux forçats dont nous avons annoncé l’évasion du bagne de Toulon ont été arrêtés par un gendarme dans la commune de Rousset. Ils avaient encore au pied l’anneau du bagne.“)

Escaping from Le Bagne de Toulon

As an aside, anyone living in Toulon was incentivized to capture prison escapees: according to the Petit Marseillais 24 May 1873 p.3, you’d get 100 francs for an arrest outside the city walls, 50 francs inside the city walls, or 25 francs inside the port itself.

Searching Le Petit Marseillais for 1872-1873 revealed only two actual escapees from Le Bagne de Toulon in those years: Jean Canot and Francois Truchet on 28 Sep 1872. The final report (before the Bagne was close down) of an attempted escape was on 5th Apr 1873:

Hier, après-midi, cinq forçats se sont évadés du l’arsenal ; ils ont exécuté leur opération en plein jour, en franchissant le mur d’enceinte.

Le premier qui s’est évadé a failli, en sautant, tomber sur les épaules d’une femme qui passait sur le chemin de ronde.

Afin de dissimuler la coupe des cheveux, qui aurait pu les compromettre, ils s’etaient munis de couffins qui leur servaient de parasol et de coiffure à la fois ; puis, comme ils n’avaient pas de temps à perdre ils filaient lestement en ayant encore les fers aux pieds. Tout à coup ils se trouvèrent en présence d’un obstable imprévu. C’était un factionnaire intelligent qui, étonné de voir circuler des condamnés sans l’assistance d’un garde chiourme, leur barra résolument le passage.

Pendant que I’on essayait do parlementer, la gendarmerie maritime, qui était lancée à leur poursuite, vint mettre un terme aux explications.

Les cinq forçats ont été ramenés au bagne, avec une note qui leur donne droit au prochain départ pour la Nouvelle-Calédonie.

A quicky translation:

Yesterday afternoon, five convicts attempted to escape from the arsenal in broad daylight, clambering over the perimeter wall.

The first to escape almost fell on the shoulders of a woman walking on the rampart while jumping.

In order to conceal their haircuts, which could have given them away, they had brought along baskets which served as both parasols and head wear; then, as they had no time to waste, they sped nimbly off, though still wearing irons on their feet. Suddenly they found themselves in the presence of an unforeseen obstacle. This was an intelligent sentry who, astonished to see convicts circulating without the assistance of a guard, resolutely barred their passage.

While trying to talk their way past him, the maritime gendarmerie, which had been in hot pursuit, quickly appeared, putting a rapid end to their discussion.

The five convicts were hauled back to the penal colony, and given a note entitling them to the next departure for New Caledonia. [Which held the Pacific prison that many of the Toulon bagnards would soon be moved to.]

The Nouvelle Caledonie Prisons

As an aside, you might think that escaping from France’s maritime prisons on New Caledonia (in the Pacific!) would be completely impossible. Yet a number of convicts did manage to escape and make the crossing to Queensland. Arguably the most famous was Henri, Marquis of Rochefort (editor of “La Lanterne”), who made it across along with a number of his fellow Communard political prisoners in March 1874.

This 1955 paper claims that in the decade to 1884, “no fewer than 247 escaped convicts from New Caledonia had landed in Australia”, though the figures given to Queensland’s Attorney General in 1883 (quoted in the much more recent paper here, p.563) was significantly lower.

But technology killed that whole route stone dead: when an undersea telegraph cable was established between New Caledonia and Australia in the 1890s, any final hope of escape by sea dwindled to nothing.

French Prison Tattoos – Fleurs de Bagne

One last thing: on a French tattoo-themed fashion brand’s website, I learnt a little about “Fleurs de Bagne” – prison tattoos. Perhaps more importantly, the page included a reading list for books about Fleurs de Bagne:

• Les Tatouages du milieu by Jacques Delarue and Robert Giraud
• Au Bagne by Albert Londres
• Une Histoire Du Milieu by Jérôme Pierrat
• Dry Guillotine by René Belbenoit
• L’Argot du Milieu by Jean Lacassagne
• Le Travailleur de la Nuit, a comic book about Alexandre Jacob
• Les Pegriots by Auguste Le Breton

I’m hoping that one of these might possibly fleetingly mention French prison ciphers but… that’s just the kind of lucky dumb stuff I tend to hope for, without really believing it will come true. I guess that’s why I sit here surrounded by unbelievably niche books. 😉

A trawl through newspapers.com’s (paywalled) archive throws up various tidbits to do with fantasy-spinning wife-killer Henry Debosnys. For example, that his defence counsel consisted of Arod K. Dudley of Elizabethtown and Royal Corbin of Plattsburgh; that his brain “weighed fifty-two ounces“; and that on the day of his execution, “he commenced the day with his usual series of noises in imitation of different animals, of which he was a perfect mimic”.

On that same day, he was asked by the Reverend Father Reddington if there was anything he wanted to say. Debosnys’ reply: “I have, I am innocent of the crime. You have made a mistake. The blood on my knife was the blood of a chipmunk.” Just so we have his – completely credible – story of how he didn’t kill his wife on record. Lying bastard.

“Paris green and vinegar”

Perhaps more intriguingly, a short piece in the Citizen-Examiner of Hayneville, Alabama (15th Nov 1882) shows a further side to Debosnys:

He wrote an ordinary letter and handed it, open, to the sheriff and asked him to mail it to the address in New York. It became incidentally mislaid, and several days afterwards the sheriff was astounded, on reverting to it, to find another complete letter in green ink, written between the lines. It showed the prisoner and the correspondent to be members of a communits [sic] society, and suggested plans of escape, threatening the sheriff and asking aid. It was discovered afterward that the miscreant had procured by some means Paris green and vinegar, which formed a liquid whose traces were at first invisible, and by the lapse of time developed these characters.

Monsieur Keff

There’s also an intriguing account courtesy of a French journalist that appeared in the Post-Star (Glens Falls, NY) on 07 Jul 1883, which Cheri Farnsworth quotes a slightly fuller version of (from the New York Sun) on pp.84-86 (but somewhat scoffs at, it has to be said):

I am positive that the so-called Henry DeBosnys was my comrade Keff. I see him still, a good-sized fellow, with long, black hair, a smooth, fat, always carefully shaved face emerging from a high white cravat, a very emphatic talker and elocutionist, especially when he recited his own verses. watching lovingly in the meantime the skillful blackening up of an old Marseillaise pipe which he seemed to have been born smoking. For five years, we met in Paris during the regular six weeks’ vacation of the provincial colleges in which he was a teacher, the university not allowing him a stay of more than one scholastic year, whether in the north, the east, the west, the south, Corsica, or even Algeria, because he always ran into debt and kept company with tipplers. I have still in my panoply the pretty pocket pistol with a damascened butt which I lent him three times to blow out what he used to call his brains, in consequence of three distinct failures in hunting rich heiresses. Keff showed me the last time I saw him the following letter:

“MR. KEFF: I’ve just found among my daughter’s papers two letters, one which is in very poor poetry, signed by you, and states that you are ready to elope with my Giuseppa on the horse of a certain Mazeppa, whom I suspect to be a licensed vendor of Bastia. The other is signed by a Mr. Peyrodal, a druggist’s clerk, now with his family at Cette. I warn you both that I give you two weeks to come and marry my daughter Giuseppa. So much the worse for the one who arrives second in the race. He is a dead man. With much respect,
BRASCATELLI D’ISTRIA,
Non-commissioned officer in the gendarmerie of Bastia.”

[…] Keff said he was going to San Domingo, and proposed to join the army there. “I am sure,” he said, “It is my true calling in this world. When young I fought like a lion near Colonel de Montagnac when we attacked Lidi-Brahim’s [sic] marabout. I even remember that I fled wonderfully quick with Major Courby de Cognord and his forty hussars, and wrote on that affair a magnificent piece of poetry.” “What nonsense, man!” [I said] “At that time you were only twelve years of age, and at Charlemagne college with me.” “You must be mistaken; I was at Lidi-Brahim, for I wrote verses about it.” I did not insist, knowing well that it was his hobby to think that he had been a witness of whatever he wrote verses about. I have not heard of him since.

Well, Farnsworth’s scoffing notwithstanding, I think you have to admit this perpetually-heiress-chasing mad-fantasist Keff does sound a great deal like our Henry Debosnys.

At the same time, I’d add that the (actual) battle of Sidi-Brahim was in September 1845, which (if Keff was, as the correspondent writes, 12 years old at the time) would make Keff’s birth year 1833.

Pierre Keff

Looking at the Keff surname, it turns out that there is a whole cluster of Keffs from Alsace-Lorraine. Because of Alsace’s close connections with Germany, a register of people from Alsace was drawn up in February and September 1872 (just after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871), which still exists and has been digitized. Of these Keffs, two in particular stand out:

• Pierre Keff, b. 12 May 1833 in Chateaurouge, who in September 1872 was living in Toulon
• Jean Keff, b. 25 July 1841 in Bouzonville, who in September 1872 was living in Toulon

Jean Keff appears in FamilySearch as having been born on 25 July 1841 in Bouzonville to Pierre Keff and Catherine Andre. Separately, FamilySearch lists the same-named couple (without ever connecting the dots) as having been the parents of:

• Madeleine Keff (born and died in January 1844 in Bouzonville)
• Elisabeth Keff (b. 11 April 1843 in Bouzonville, and who was living in Paris in 1872)
• Joseph Keff (b. 30 April 1845 in Bouzonville, baptized 1 May 1845, died 19 Jan 1846)

A Jean Keff (again, with the same parents) married a Reine Lichtenberger (daughter of Michel Lichtenberger and Reine Keser, born in 25 Sep 1836 in Oberentzen) on 18 Feb 1865 in Paris (district 19e). Though I should add that by the time of the 1872 register, Reine Keff was listed as a “femme separee” living in Paris.

As far as Pierre Keff goes: Chateau-Rouge is a commune in Moselle, right on the modern French-German border (i.e. we’re not interested in the Parisian Metro station here). And we have a marriage record for a Pierre Keff (with the same parents) marrying a Catherine Birschens (born in Pays-Bas, daughter of Jean Birschens and Marie Scharbantger) on 02 Aug 1862 in Paris (district 19e).

According to Caroline Seckel’s Ancestry tree, a Catherine Birschens was born in 2 May 1835 in Waldbillig, Echternach, Grevenmacher, Luxembourg to Jean Berchen and Anne Marie Charpentier: although she is marked down as having been married to an “unknown spouse”, it seems a solid bet that this is the same person.

As always with genealogy, it’s not 100% certain but I think it’s safe to say there would seem to be strong evidence from all this that Pierre Keff and Jean Keff were brothers, with Elisabeth Keff their sister.

Putting this together with the Parisian journalist’s recollection of Keff’s having been 12 years old in 1845, it seems reasonably likely to me that the heiress-chasing fantasist he recalled from Paris was in fact Pierre Keff (b. 12 May 1833).

What Happened to Pierre Keff?

That, alas, would seem to be a very much harder question to answer. There seems to be no immigration record of any Keff going to America, or of any Keff naturalization etc. So it seemed likely to me that the best place to search would be French archival records. So I looked at Gallica, and found a hit from 5th May 1872 in Le Petit journal des tribunaux. This was a really awful slice of history, which I’ll give in French and then translate:

Jean Keff a quitté sa femme et ses enfants pour vivre en concubinage avec la veuve Bon. En allant chercher cette femme à l’atelier où elle travaillait, Jean Keff evait vu une jeune fille nommée Henriette, ouvrière du même atelier, et il conçut le projet d’abuser de cette jeune fille.

Se faisant passer pour mari et femme, Keff et la veuve Bon parvinrent à se faire confier la jeune Henriette sous prétexte d’une partie à Grenelle. Ils avaient promis que la jeune fille serait ramenée avant dix heures du soir. Cette promesse ne fut pas tenue et ils firent coucher la jeune fille dans laur logis. Pendant la nuit, eurent lieu des tentatives doieuses auxquels put heureusement résister la jeune Henriette.

C’est à l’occasion de ces faits que Jean Keff, Pierre Keff at la veuve Bon comparaissaient devant le jury sous l’accusation de tentative de voil, de complicité du même crime at d’attentat à la pudeur. L’affaire a eu lieu à huis clos.

Déclarées coupables sans circonstances atténuantes, ils ont été tous trois condamnés à la peine des travaux forcés à perpetuité.

Au sortir de l’audience, Jean keff a voulu se frapper avec un couteau qu’il était parvenu à dissimuler ; mais il a été aussitôt désarmé.

My translation (free and easy, of course you can translate it better):

Jean Keff left his wife and children and moved in with the widow of M. Bon. While going to look for this woman in the workshop where she worked, Jean Keff saw a young girl named Henriette, who worked at the same place, and conceived a plan to rape her.

Passing themselves off as husband and wife, Keff and the widow Bon managed to get the young Henriette into their trust under the pretext of a game at Grenelle. Their promise that the girl would be brought back before 10pm was not kept, and they made the young girl sleep in their home. During the night, various dubious attempts [at sexual assault] took place which fortunately the young Henriette was able to resist.

It was in respect of the above events that Jean Keff, Pierre Keff and the widow Bon appeared before the jury on charges of attempted deception, complicity and indecent assault. The case took place behind closed doors. Found guilty without extenuating circumstances, all three were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Coming out of the hearing, Jean Keff attempted to stab himself with a knife he had managed to conceal on his person; but he was immediately disarmed.

The three convicts appealed to the Supreme Court.

(There’s also a report in Le Petite Presse of 3rd May 1872 covering the same trial.)

In the appeal hearing of 30 May 1872, the court rejected the appeals of Jean Keff and Marie Ratier (la veuve Bon), but upheld Pierre Keff’s appeal because of a procedural error in his interrogation. However, the court insisted Pierre Keff should be immediately rearrested, reinterrogated (properly this time) and re-tried for the same offence.

So… What Happened Next?

If both Jean Keff and Pierre Keff were in Toulon in September 1872, it seems likely to me that they were both in the Bagne of Toulon (1748-1873), the gigantic prison made (in-)famous by Victor Hugo in Les Misérables. So it would seem likely that Pierre Keff’s retrial happened, and that Pierre was then sent to the Bagne with his brother for a similar life imprisonment.

We know that Henry Debosnys’ body was found to be covered in (what seemed like) shocking tattoos (typical of prisons), and that he was also thought to be expert in escaping from prisons. So this would seem to be the point where the two bigger narratives might somehow overlap and merge into one, right?

What are the odds that Pierre Keff escaped from the Bagne, and fled to America under an assumed name, leaving his – errrm – miserable life in France behind him? Actually, it turns out that this is fairly unlikely, because few people escaped Le Bagne. (If anyone has access to Docteur Raoulx’s (1929) “Le Bagne de Toulon“, a (small) roll-call of escapees is apparently on pages 17-20.)

All the same, given that it was 1873 when Le Bagne was closed, the Keff brothers were almost certainly then moved on to other prisons: so it could well be from a different prison that one (or indeed both) escaped. But I haven’t found any record of this.

Huge kudos to anyone who can find evidence that Pierre Keff escaped from prison, because despite my best efforts I’ve basically run out of runway here. 🙁

Mary Celestine

One last brief thing: because Debosnys talks of “Mrs Celestine”, I wondered whether ‘Celestine’ might have in fact been his previous wife’s surname rather than her first name. And a quick search of Ancestry revealed that in 1870 there was indeed a Mary Celestine (age 30, born in Pennsylvania) working as a teacher in Philadelphia Ward 27 District 89, and apparently living with lots of other teachers and children. Given that the lady at the top of the page seems to have a job title “Lady Superioress”, my guess is that this was a small Catholic boarding school.

So: might Mary Celestine have actually been a nun at an earlier stage in her life? After everything else I’ve found out today, that wouldn’t surprise me one little bit. Perhaps we shall see.

Some interesting correspondence in the last few days has brought the case of hanged murderer Henry Debosnys (along with his curious unsolved ciphers and his not-very-credible autobiography) back to mind. It has also reminded me of a number of Debosnys-related things I’ve been meaning to post to Cipher Mysteries for ages…

Sektu on the Portuguese that isn’t

Having originally posted about Debosnys here back in 2015, I’ve long meant to get round to posting links to the Sektu blog. Back in 2017, its author (someone called Brian, who now seems to have gone very quiet) attempted to see how far the clues embedded in Debosnys’ self-serving mixture of misdirections and lies could be pursued.

For example, Brian notes that even though Debosnys claimed to have been born in Portugal, the fragments of (what seems like) Portuguese in his papers aren’t really much like Portuguese:

Comoderondas inacia bêco olondo inoto para
Imbiabo kotaronc molonk niarotan pérana
[…]
inno calledaz
Ontro de palade mosa kaen faleï tonüe dhala pico indor kouniss plaira colrose, inbello monozy impiodo cara. ûntez noüméa, tintems oda formandore, artosa passat Otiva …[remaining text not clear or cut off]

Any suggestions as to what to make of this folderol?

Brian also notes that Debosnys’ Greek poem is basically an incomplete copy of Thomas Moore’s preface to his Odes of Anacreon: and separately wonders whether the ciphered lines might be Debosnys’ version of how he thought the poem should have ended. It’s an interesting suggestion, for sure.

Brian also transcribed part of Debosnys’ cipher (though he seems not to have posted his transcription anywhere), though I’d caution (just as before) that it’s not at all obvious what the best transcription strategy would be for it. He also posted some notes on what he called the “N glyph“, along with various difficulties with it.

Sektu on Debosnys’ real name

Brian made four interesting posts on trying to work out Debosnys’ real name. His first post points out that when Debosnys talks of the “franck terror“, he is almost certainly referring to “franc-tireurs“, who were volunteers (many from other countries and/or from overseas) who joined guerilla groups to fight for France in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Yet as with everything else in Debosnys’ account, his claims of importance (he implies he was a leader of a group) are very probably exaggerated (for example, Brian’s second post points out that he was not Louis Delpech): but Debosnys may well have taken part.

In a more promising vein, Brian’s third post in the set goes through the passenger list of the Cimbria (which Debosnys claimed to have sailed on with his wife Judith, but which I had previously not been very impressed by). In his fourth post, he considers that Debosnys and his wife might have in fact been Jacob Pomries (a slatemaker) and his wife Elise (aged 35 and 22 on the Cimbria). But… he doesn’t actually seem hugely convinced, to be fair.

Brian also tried to pursue Debosnys’ tattoo-like handshake drawing, but without huge success. He also noted a possible connection between Debosnys’ curious middle name “Deletnack” and the (not very plausible-looking reverse anagram) M. le vicomte de Letnac, whose memories of Italy was published as a book by J. Cantel of Paris.

Finally, Brian dug up an interesting story about a “Colonel Henry” from the Paris Commune (Debosnys loosely implied that he was “Colonel Henry”). Was he Debosnys? It seems a little unlikely to me, but… who can tell?

Celestine Debosnys

One of Debosnys’ wives was called Celestine: she was born around 1839, and died in Philadelphia on the 5th March 1882 (presumably at Debosnys’ “miserable shanty […] on South 1st Street near Greenwich Point in the Quaker City”, according to the Essex County Republican, Farnsworth p.91), having starved to death. All Ancestry has to say is that she was white, and was buried in the Alms House Cemetery.

Farnsworth gives her name (once) as “Celestine Desmarais”, but I suspect that this is a conflation of “Celestine” and “Judith Desmarais” (a different dead Debosnys wife). (Note that miscamusca tumbled down an Ancestry rabbit hole chasing Canadian Adeline Desmarais’ 1865 marriage to Joseph Jourdain, but I believe that was someone else.)

It seems bizarre to me that we know so little about her, so I went a-looking myself for any Celestines in Philadelphia born close to 1839. However, I found little of interest there, not even French-born Celestine Munch (b. 6 Nov 1838, d. 12 Jan 1915). The 1870 US Census has very few Celestines in Philadelphia born 1838-1840: apart from Celestine Munch, there’s just Celestine Brown age 30 (born Pennsylvania, Sales Lady, daughter of Anthony Brown (born Baden) & Celestine (born France)).

I also looked for any women called Celestine who got married in Canada in December 1872 (as Debosnys claimed to have done), but found the Canadian search tools frustratingly inexact: perhaps Celestine Commier, Celestine Menard, Celestine Lavaris, or Celestine Lafounesse?

I also looked for any women called Celestine living in Wilmington Delaware (“as I’m sure you’re well aware”) in the 1880 Census (Debosnys claimed to have been living there in 1880), but found only Celestine J. Miller, wife of John F. Miller, with daughters Mary (14) and Cecelia (12).

As for looking in the 1880 US Census for any women called Celestine born in Canada, that yielded only Celestine Lazette (wife of Joseph (50), mother of Maggie (18), Libbie (15) and Julius (14)), in Monroe Michigan. And the only Celestine born in France living in Philadelphia was Celestine Munch.

Having said all that, it might be that someone more skilled at navigating the US Census will be able to see if anyone with a similar name was living “on South 1st Street near Greenwich Point” in 1880. You know, just in case Debosnys was lying about just about everything in his whole life. Which I certainly can’t rule out at the moment.

DNA, and why not?

Back in 2015, Byron Deveson suggested that someone should carefully recover Henry Debosnys’ DNA from the pieces in the museum (there’s a skull and, gorily enough, a hangman’s noose) and drop it into GEDmatch etc.

So why is it 2021 and nobody has thought to do this yet? Makes no sense to me.

A quick note following up yesterday’s post about Henry Debosnys and the S.S.Cimbria (that Debosnys claimed to have caught from Le Havre in June 1871).

According to a February 1980 article (in issue #105 of The Chronicle of the US Classic Postal Issues) called The Hamburg American Line – Mail Packets from New York 4 January 1870 to 23 December 1875 – via Plymouth and Cherbourg to Hamburg by Clifford L. Friend and Walter Hubbard, the S.S. Cimbria did not (just as I suspected) call at Le Havre on the crossings arriving at New York on the 21st May 1871 or 2nd July 1871.

Here’s a table containing links to all the information I have for Cimbria arrivals in New York in 1870 and 1871:

- Le Havre -/- New York -
23 Jan 1870 / 04 Feb 1870 - Roll 323, but Cumbria out of Glasgow rather than Cimbria?
05 Mar 1870 / 15 Mar 1870 - Roll 324, pp.253-264
16 Apr 1870 / 26 Apr 1870 - Roll 326, pp.299-315
04 Jun 1870 / 14 Jun 1870 - Roll 330, pp.151-166
........... / 14 Nov 1870
........... / 05 Jan 1871
19 Feb 1871 / 01 Mar 1871 - Roll 339, pp.317-323
01 Apr 1871 / 09 Apr 1871 - Passenger list
........... / 21 May 1871 - Roll 343, pp.118-139
........... / 02 Jul 1871 - Roll 345, pp.141-153
15 Sep 1871 / 25 Sep 1871 - Roll 349, pp.34-49
28 Oct 1871 / 08 Nov 1871 - Passenger list

(Say what you like: people may keep trying to stamp it out, but philately will get you everywhere.)

Hence Debosnys plainly could not have caught the Cimbria at Le Havre in Jun 1871, because the ship didn’t stop there on that Atlantic crossing.

Moreover, even though 1871 saw many people emigrating from France to America, this is not reflected in the passenger lists of the Cimbria, in which I have seen not a single French person in 1871, and but a handful in 1870 (almost all of which were people in their 20s). I cannot help but suspect that the Cimbria did not normally take on passengers at Le Havre. As a result, right now I am deeply skeptical that Debosnys travelled across on the Cimbria in either 1870 or 1871.

Hence I think it far more likely that Debosnys came over on one of the numerous ships from Le Havre during 1871 carrying French emigrants. But trawling through those passenger lists (many of which are quite poor quality in the PDFs of the microfilms) would be quite an epic task, with only a small chance of success.

It might be better to first narrow down the range of years in which he made this journey. Currently, the earliest external record we have of Debosnys in America is from the French Society in Philadelphia in December 1878, where he and his wife Celestine were the recipient of charity until her death in 1882 [Adirondack Enigma, pp.90-91]. Celestine certainly existed, because commenter Misca found this entry on ancestry.com:-

Name: Celestine Debosnys
Birth Date: abt 1839
Death Date: 5 Mar 1882
Death Place: Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Age at Death: 43
Gender: Female
Race: White
Cemetery: Alms House
Marital Status: Married
FHL Film Number: 2057163

“I checked the Alms House cemetery. She is not listed there but this may be an oversight of some sort. Not sure.”

I guess the next step back in time would be finding the date of their marriage. Hmmm…